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Posts tagged with "ipad mini"

iPad mini: Our Complete Overview

Phil Schiller took the stage today at Apple’s media event in San Jose to officially unveil the iPad mini, Apple’s latest entry in the iPad line-up.

As widely rumored, the iPad mini features the same 4:3 aspect ratio of the iPad with a smaller, 7.9” display carrying the same resolution of the original iPad and iPad 2 – 1024x768. The smaller display has allowed Apple to cut down the overall size of the device, which also features a lighter form factor and thinner design, as well as narrower borders. The iPad mini is, from a design standpoint, reminiscent of the iPad 2 and third-generation iPad, with a flat aluminum back, albeit with more rounded edges.

iPad mini is every inch an iPad. With its gorgeous 7.9-inch display, iPad mini features the same number of pixels as the original iPad and iPad 2, so you can run more than 275,000 apps designed specifically for iPad,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing.

Hardware

The iPad mini comes in two colors: white & silver and black & slate. The biggest feature, however, is its design, which is only 7.2mm thin and 53% lighter than the third generation iPad. Schiller compared the thinness of the iPad mini to a pencil. The iPad mini weighs 0.68lbs, making it as “light as a pad of paper”. Read more

Apple Decorates California Theatre for iPad Mini Event→

Apple Decorates California Theatre for iPad Mini Event

As reported by Techie Buzz, Apple has decorated the California Theatre in San Jose, CA – the location for its upcoming media event next Tuesday – with colorful banners. Using the same graphical approach of the media invitation, the banners show an Apple logo inside a “psychedelic” background that also forms an Apple logo. The theatre marquee simply read “Apple Special Event”.

As we noted when Apple sent the invitations for the event to the press, the graphics are somewhat reminiscent of the first iPad event’s invitation, as well as background images Apple has used for recent events in San Francisco. Continuing an unofficial trend that has members of the press constantly speculating, Apple this time chose to use a “We’ve got a little more to show you” tagline.

Apple is, in fact, rumored to be announcing a smaller version of the iPad next week. Rumored to be called “iPad Mini”, the device will likely feature a 7.85-inch display and a thinner, lighter form factor. However, recent rumors have claimed Apple will also announce iBooks 3.0, a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro, and new iMacs and Mac minis at next week’s event.

Check out the entire photo gallery at Techie Buzz.

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Apple Confirms: Media Event on October 23

As first reported by The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple, Apple just sent out invitations to the press for a media event taking place on October 23 in San Jose. The invitations show an Apple logo with the tag line “We’ve got a little more to show you”.

Unlike other recent events that have been held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Apple will hold this event at the California Theatre in San Jose .

According to recent speculation, Apple will unveil a new, smaller 7.85-inch iPad at the event dubbed “iPad Mini”. The device has been long rumored to be a smaller version of the last-gen iPad 2, carrying the same 1024x768 non-Retina display in a thinner and lighter body with a smaller display. The core feature of the iPad Mini should be portability, as well as a reduced price for consumers.

Curiously enough, the invitation is somewhat reminiscent of the one sent for the original iPad event in January 2010.

As noted by Jason Snell, the last time Apple held an event in San Jose at California Theater was for the iPod photo announcement with a Bono/Edge live performance.

Based on more recent rumors, next week may also see the introduction of refreshed iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini lines. Specifically, Apple is rumored to be planning a 13-inch version of the MacBook Pro with Retina display, a thinner iMac, and a new Mac mini model.

To get a sense of what a 7.85” (as opposed to 9.7”) iPad Mini would be like, check out our mockups from July.

Get A Sense Of What A 7.85” iPad mini Would Be Like

Rumors of a smaller iPad were back again this week with a report from Bloomberg and since then the rumor mill has been in full swing. Not much detail was in the rumor, other than it’s a smaller iPad and that it’ll launch later this year. Earlier in the year, the display was rumored to be around 7.85” and A.T. Faust of AppAdvice gave compelling reasons as to why it makes sense. That number seems to have stuck around with this latest round of iPad mini rumors.

“The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit [a lower] price point,” Jobs said. “It’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software. As a software driven company, we think about the software strategies first.” - AllThingsD

When I read the rumors this week I sighed, not again. I wasn’t the only one either, an iPad mini seems like a compromise, with little advantage. Plus the old Steve Jobs quote about 7 inch iPads just kept circling around. But others weren’t so closed minded and were considering whether it might actually have a place in Apple’s product line.

The biggest issue I have is with the screen, and whether the screen can still be sufficiently useful at the smaller size. To find out, I decided to do the old hack of making a little paper template of the iPad mini and see how it looked. I decided to stick with the 7.85” diagonal display size suggested and use a bezel only slightly smaller than those on the current iPad. For comparison I also made a paper template for the current iPad and versions of both with the bevel colored in. You can download, print and cut them out for yourself.

Note: make sure when printing that it isn’t being scaled up or down, as that will adjust the size of the “screen”. Check the little measurement guides to ensure it printed out correctly.

That was all good and well, but it didn’t really give me a sense of what the UI might look like on an iPad mini. So I decided to take some screenshots and shrink them down to the appropriate size. But I also made a duplicate copy of the screenshot and using Photoshop, reconfigured the UI to fit on a 7.85” display without adjusting the size of the buttons. To my mind that’s the only way that Apple would do this - Apple does frequently remind iOS designers to keep buttons at a tappable size (mentioned prominently in iOS Human Interface Guide), just shrinking the current iPad display would make buttons more difficult to tap.

Finally I put it all together into a Keynote presentation so that I could view it on my iPad and visibly see and compare how it would look. I’ve uploaded it, so you can do the same yourself. You just need Keynote for iOS and go into presentation mode to look at it yourself. If you want to go the extra step, cut your iPad mini template out and place it on top of your iPad whilst viewing the screenshots.

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When It Comes to 7.85” iPad, The Question Is “Why”

(MacRumors’ mockup of a 7.85-inch iPad)

In the latest episode of his weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin, The Talk Show, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber suggested he has heard from “numerous” sources within Apple about a 7.85-inch iPad being tested in the company’s labs.

MacRumors offers a transcript:

Well, I don’t know. What I do know is that they have one in the lab…a 7.85 inch iPad that runs at 1024×768… it’s just like the 9.7” iPad shrunk down a little bit. Apps wouldn’t need to be recompiled or redesigned to work optimally on it. It’s just the iPad smaller.

First off, I haven’t listened to the show yet, as I’d like to reflect upon some ideas I’ve been saving for the past months when rumors about this “smaller iPad” kept coming out. As for why 7.85 inches would be the ideal size for a smaller iPad, AppAdvice’s A.T Faust had a good explanation a few weeks back.

When it comes to this fabled smaller iPad, I don’t think the question we should be asking is “really?”. Of course Apple has a smaller iPad in their labs. Of course it has a 4:3 ratio to maintain existing resolution schemes. I’m more doubtful about the rumors of partners in China mass-producing these units, but I’m sure there are all kinds of neat product prototypes at Cupertino. For the same reason, do you think Apple hasn’t tested all the possible combinations of iPhone form factors? Bigger MacBook Airs? Different Apple TV designs? Do you really believe the world’s most valuable company…no, any sufficiently successful tech company gets an electronic device “just right” on their first try? Of course there are prototypes and iterations. And that a smaller iPad is one of them should be no surprise.

The question that we should be asking is: why would Apple want to release a smaller iPad? Now that’s an interesting discussion, as there are a number of factors worth considering in regards to expanding the iPad line to smaller versions.

Let’s start with the simple one: Apple won’t release a smaller iPad to “respond” to Samsung and the likes. Please note the difference between “consider” and “release” here. Because even if we agree that the rumor of prototypes in the labs is no surprise, then we’d argue on a reason for releasing such product, and I think competition is not a valid one. Apple won’t release a smaller iPad because it feels threatened. Apple is an engineering company at heart, they look at the data, and data suggests there is no need to feel threatened. Sure, Amazon’s Kindle Fire is rumored to be fairly successful, but I bet it’s not that profitable for the company. Amazon didn’t build it with iPad-quality components. So if people would like a first-class smaller iPad, this brings me to the next point: hardware.

Retina

There are two popular assumptions going on these days: that a smaller iPad would be perfect for portable eBook reading, and that it would have the resolution of older iPads – 1024x768 pixels. Here’s my problem with this discussion: I don’t see Apple as the company going backwards in terms of specs. I don’t see them coming out with an iPad that’s new and smaller, more portable and lightweight, but carrying the resolution of last year’s iPad. The Retina display isn’t just a display for Apple, it’s a standard that sets the bar higher. Why did the iPod touch gain a Retina display (even if not of the same quality as the iPhone’s)? Because Retina was the new standard in 2010, and Apple had to bring it over to the other 3.5-inch device, the iPod touch. The way I see it, the same reasoning applies, both in terms of philosophy and product concept, to the iPad: the third generation’s iPad Retina display has set the bar higher and I don’t see Apple coming out with a new iPad that shows its pixels once again. With a 7.85-inch screen and the same resolution of older gen iPads, 163ppi wouldn’t look nearly as good as the new iPad’s 264ppi (the original iPad had 132ppi). Apple is a company that iterates, slowly, but inexorably, and the Retina revolution is now indeed impossible to prevent.

So let’s assume Apple does have a smaller iPad with a Retina display. That would make for incredible image quality at 326ppi, but it would create a series of new problems from a software perspective. A 7.85-inch iPad with a 2048x1536 “Retina” display, in fact, would come at 326 ppi – the same as Retina iPhones and iPods. Whilst that would play well in terms of keeping the math unified across the board, it could pose a question for developers. Even without having to update graphics for the new resolution (and maintaining the same size of tap targets), a physically smaller device will inevitably make the user interface run on a more physically constrained display, and what makes sense on a 10-inch display doesn’t necessarily work just as fine on a 7.85-inch one. Apps will run with their existing designs, but there’s the possibility some developers would still want to optimize some graphical elements for the new size.

And then, of course, there is the hardware side of this debate. If Apple had to put a bigger battery (1mm thicker) in the new iPad to compensate for the resources required by more processing power and the Retina display, what makes us think that consumer technology is “already there” to power a Retina display on an even smaller iPad? Batteries small enough and capable of powering a Retina display may already exist, but I assume they wouldn’t be ready for mass production on a large scale. More importantly, if they don’t exist yet, it wouldn’t be a surprise either, as Apple had to make its existing battery bigger (something they don’t usually do) to power its new iPad. For as much as miniaturization is one of Apple’s big focuses, I don’t think we have the right technology to make such a device usable for a long period of time (keep in mind it would supposedly be used a lot for reading). The smaller a device gets, the harder it becomes to balance factors like battery life, temperature, and thickness, and that explains why Apple had to wait until the fourth iteration of the iPhone to implement a high-resolution display.

Now, considering all the points I have mentioned above, we have a plethora of alternative theories and combinations as to why Apple could still figure out a way to produce a smaller iPad. Of all them, I find this idea by Odi Kosmatos particularly interesting because it plays well with the math described above: Odi makes the case for a smaller iPad (7-inch as opposed to the rumored 7.85-inch model) that carries a 1920x1080 resolution that could allow for 326ppi and Retina iPhone apps running at native size on the device. While I find the numbers fascinating, I believe Apple would never do an “iPad” that doesn’t run iPad apps – that’s just absurd. But a device that “sits” in the middle, like the original iPad did for smartphones and computers? A device in between iPhones and iPads? Now that’s an intriguing theory which goes back to the old eBook-reading device rumor: I don’t think the market is so saturated yet that there’s a real need for a new savior that sits in the middle of existing options, but we’ll see.

Smaller?

The other big theory is that, assuming a smaller iPad with Retina display would be unfeasible in the short term, a 7.85-inch iPad with 1024x768 resolution would still be good enough for portability, gaming, kids, and education. Some notes about these possibilities: let alone the fact that I still have to hear of people not buying iPads because they really hate the 9.7-inch form factor, is the existing iPad really not that portable? You can picture the rumored device by looking at the iPad’s display and imagining a smaller iPad inside it. Is that a considerable difference in terms of portability?

Is there really a market of consumers not buying iPads because they want a smaller iPad, or are the nerds simply excited about the rumors? Let’s get real: what would a 7.85-inch iPad do incommensurably better than a regular iPad to give it a reason to exist? You can immediately tell the difference between an iPod nano and an iPod classic, a 13-inch MacBook Air and the 15-inch MacBook Pro (one of the reasons why I think the 13-inch MacBook Pro is a weird choice). Would the 7.85-inch iPad be a product that can stand out on its own, making the few inches less a reason for potential consumers to choose it?

About the “gaming, kids, and education” theory: when I think of all the possible explanations, this is the one that makes some sense, although I still don’t see it as the reason to release a smaller iPad. Apple is a consumer electronics company, and with their iOS devices they have made sure every possible market segment can benefit from them. From doctors and pilots to writers and teachers, iPhones and iPads can appeal to everyone. Why? Because it’s the software that makes the difference. By releasing a smaller iPad, Apple would put the focus on dedicated hardware, rather than software, for the first time in years. Oh, but you can argue Apple did make an iMac for education. Fair enough, but I’ll argue that the Mac market is nowhere near the size of the iOS market. Is it worth producing and releasing a smaller iPad specifically aimed at certain market segments? Personally, I don’t think so – but I could be wrong. What I am certain of is that the Retina display is inarguably better than old displays in every way, and textbooks and games benefit from it. Would a smaller, non-Retina iPad meant for textbooks and games be as appealing as the bigger iPad with a Retina display running the same apps?

Why?

As you can see, I am not saying Apple will never release a smaller iPad, because I don’t know, and because saying “never” when it comes to Apple rumors is always a big bet. My point is, when rumors are getting out of hand, it is always better to shift the conversation away from the “what” and back to the “why” to understand if what we are arguing about does even make sense. And in the case of the 7.85-inch iPad, there are a series of technological issues, software questions, and market debates that leave me skpetical as to whether Apple may release such a product this year.